Why do we need marriage at all? Because of the asymmetry of many relationships and for policy reasons to provide for the protection of the weak (discarded stay-at-home spouses and dependent children). If we had complete equality, we would not need to marry.

Belated response to Sue: one of the major purposes of marriage is the controlling of inheritance. That’s what originally got the Church into it — a great source for revenue (e.g., determining who could inherit, taking the assets when children were apostate, etc). This neatly dovetails with control of “morals” with regard to sexuality, since that gives the ability to dictate which children are “legitimate.”

For the first time, astronomers have captured a planet that orbits around two stars instead of one.

“If you could visit there, you would see a sky with two suns, just like Luke Skywalker,” said Nick Gautier, an astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. He was speaking at a NASA press conference to announce the discovery. The finding will appear in the Sept. 16 issue ofScience.

Astute geeks will remember that Luke Skywalker grew up on a planet called Tatooine that also orbited binary stars, and one scene from the Star Wars films boasted an impressive double sunset.

Using the Kepler space telescope, astronomers spotted the Saturn-sized planet traveling around a pair of stars approximately 200 light-years away. The exoplanet takes about 229 days to orbit its dual parent stars.

With 16 years passing since Nick Leeson’s unauthorized trades brought down Barings Bank, it’s time for banks to stop pointing the finger at "rogue traders" and clean up their trading operations.

When looking at the “latest media releases” on the company website by UBS AG (UBS), each press release going back over 10 years, has a specific headline, except for the release from Thursday, which is entitled simply, “Media Release.”

Guess what event was covered by this media release?

Here’s the entire release:

“UBS has discovered a loss due to unauthorized trading by a trader in its Investment Bank. The matter is still being investigated, but UBS’s current estimate of the loss on the trades is in the range of USD 2 billion. It is possible that this could lead UBS to report a loss for the third quarter of 2011. No client positions were affected.”

Translation: “We don’t have any clue what our traders are doing on a day-to-day basis and none of our executives want to face the music, at least for the moment.”